


like a bird on the wire

by elaphoi



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/F, annie is a lesbian and she's sort of kind of coming to terms with it...slowly, content warnings for some pretty severe internalized homophobia/lesbophobia throughout, there's annie/britta but primarily an annie character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 06:53:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23846983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elaphoi/pseuds/elaphoi
Summary: “I think I’m a…” Her shoulders heave. “I wanted to do it,” Annie says instead. “Which is stupid, I know it’s stupid, because you don’t...you’re not like that, obviously. You’re…” Annie raises red-rimmed eyes to Britta, her heeled boots and skin-tight jeans, the spill of bright hair down her shoulders.“Do what?” Britta asks, quiet.Annie’s shredding a sheet of paper towel into strips, fingers working feverishly. Her skin heats. “Kiss you,” Annie says.She wants to take it back, after. I’m sorry, she would say. That’s crazy. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.But she can’t bring her mouth to shape the words.
Relationships: Annie Edison & Abed Nadir, Annie Edison & Britta Perry, Annie Edison & Jeff Winger, Annie Edison/Britta Perry
Comments: 33
Kudos: 224





	like a bird on the wire

**Author's Note:**

> And you all thought I was taking Community too seriously before? Watch THIS. 
> 
> Mostly a character study of Annie coming to terms with her sexuality, with some Annie/Britta. Warnings for internalized homophobia and two M/F scenes at varying levels of intimacy, which I've tried to keep as vague as possible and mostly included for internal reflection stuff.

Annie had considered the prospect from every conceivable angle and is positive — at least — of one thing: she is indisputably and unequivocally _not_ a lesbian. 

  
  
  


*** 

  
  


Britta keeps an arm around her as they pull apart, and Annie feels the press of Britta’s fingers over her skin, beneath the capped sleeves of her dress. She had buried her head in Annie’s shoulder moments before, smelling faintly of sweat and an overabundance of Nirvana Black, and Annie is reeling from the sudden loss of her. 

Her eyes fall to Britta’s mouth, swollen pink with kissing another girl. 

After, Britta will apologize for the men who rally around them — slimy, leering — and clamor for a kiss; a little girl-on-girl action, a little late-night television. Annie reddens and nods — too emphatically, in hindsight — and pretends she had heard them, too.

And there’s the rub, of course: she hadn’t. The reality is oh-so-much-worse. 

( She leaned in for that kiss because she wanted to. )

  
  


***

  
  


The floor of David’s closet is carpeted, and Annie’s back and shoulders bloom red where they scratch up against it. Light from the lamp on his bedside table streams through slats in the door, casting David — prone beneath her, and bared down to his Wolverine boxers — in strips of yellow. He shifts in place, the cotton of his underwear rubbing up against her thighs, and asks: “Are you sure?”

He keeps asking that: “Are you sure?” It makes Annie think maybe he isn’t. 

“We’ve been dating for months,” Annie reminds him. There’s music blasting from David’s radio — the Madonna album David had lifted from his mother’s collection, in some futile attempt to set the mood — and she’s forced to raise her voice to be heard. 

They had nearly reached the tail-end of winter, and were comfortably situated in the lull between application deadlines and the spring barrage of college acceptances. Annie had marked President’s Week — if not in her planner, nestled in amongst timestamps for dentist appointments and SAT prep courses and Adderall pickups inked in lavender pen, then certainly in the back of her mind—as the ideal window. 

David had agreed, at the time. 

Now, he slides a finger beneath the band of her bra and plucks at the clasp until Annie takes pity and undoes the hooks herself. His hands — cool and damp with sweat — close tentatively around her breasts, like he’s not sure what to make of them. Annie had devoured her fair share of paperback romance novels, and recalls — with a muted, mounting heartache — torn corsetry; lovestruck declarations, lips and tongues and teeth, and the ardent tangle of limbs against silk sheets. 

They had missed a step, somewhere along the way; they must have. 

David’s hands remain planted, with a kind of perfunctory detachment, and Annie thinks: This is wrong, This is wrong, This is wrong. 

David asks — politely, like Annie’s a cashier at the Macy’s checkout counter, and he’s requesting a refund on his KitchenAid — if she would mind not looking please, if that’s okay? and Annie obligingly screws her eyes shut and buries her face in the freckled skin of his shoulder. Annie’s relieved — suddenly — she had thought to unearth the little tube of Astroglide from her mother’s nightstand, tucked inside its cosmetic bag beneath a pack of Duracell AAs; she swallows, like wetting her throat might somehow dispel the desert between her legs. 

There's a brief burst of pain, and Annie muffles her gasp against David’s chest. He hears, and it frightens him; the measured rhythm slows, and David sits back on his palms. Annie eases gingerly off him, and looks up — blinking, with a kind of blank disbelief — at David’s cheeks, slicked with tears. She should comfort him, but she is floating somewhere outside herself; her pulse gathers speed until it is hammering against her skin. “Thank you,” Annie hears herself tell him, “That was nice,” with the civility her parents had taken such pains to instill in her, as if she had just received a lackluster Hanukkah present — one of Aunt Muriel’s scratchy hand-knit sweaters, maybe — and it was crucial that she conceal her disappointment. 

Annie washes up in the ensuite, attending to her sore thighs with a sheaf of Pampers wipes. She wedges her head between her legs and breathes sharply in through her nose; counts tiles on the floor beneath her feet, and wills the pounding of her heart to lighten. 

You did it, she remembers thinking. And, then: You won’t have to again, not anytime soon.

  
  


***

  
  


When Jeff kisses her, it isn’t like that. 

Tension crests and folds over them both, like the tide coming down; Annie tips forward — with widened eyes and parted mouth, affecting the part of ingenue he likes so well — and Jeff bends halfway to meet her. His arms encircle her waist, and drive her into the corded muscle of his chest. He presses at the crown of her head, crushing their mouths together, and Annie bows to that touch, opens sweetly for him. 

She had never been kissed as deeply, or wanted with such acute desperation. Jeff devours, and Annie lets him, lets him, lets him.

Annie thinks, then: Love is like this. Love is being longed for. Love is being swallowed whole.

  
  


***

  
  


Annie dreams about her sometimes. 

They’re nebulous visions, usually — a disjointed montage; palms planted on her quilted bedspread, or the spray of honey-colored curls — and Annie can even pretend it’s a stranger, if she wants. This woman — stranger — leans up on the heels of her hands and kisses Annie soundly. She touches Annie, and leaves her burning; her cheeks, the planes of her stomach, the expanse of skin pulled taut over the waistline of her tartan skirt. Annie arches her back and she works the catch on Annie’s bra and breathes her name and says, “You’re beautiful,” and Annie wakes with her hand pressed between damp thighs. 

Annie doesn’t often grant herself the satisfaction, only turns on her side and clamps her legs tightly together. She thinks of David — of all the ways he had not touched her — and almost, almost understands; if Annie could scrub herself clean of it, this hunger, she’s certain she would.

  
  


***

  
  


Britta finds her in the janitor’s broom cupboard, hunched over an upturned bucket. She crams herself inside — hissing when the toe of her boot glances off a caution sign, sends it clattering to the floor — and pulls the door closed behind them. Annie doesn’t bother to wipe at her eyes. She’s red-faced, wet-cheeked and her nose is overflowing; there’s no use hiding it, with Britta close enough to — well. 

She settles on the floor beneath Annie — legs spread in a wide arc, arms draped loosely over her knees, languid like a cat. Britta rocks forward on her heels, says, “Okay, what’s wrong?” and Annie swipes a balled fist over her runny nose and chokes out, “Nothing,” like there’s any chance of Britta dropping this now she’s sunk her teeth into it. 

Britta makes a skeptical noise. “Annie, you can tell me.” She makes a zipping motion — pinched fingers drawn across her mouth — and says, “Promise I won’t spill.” Annie almost laughs, but Britta plucks the roll of paper towels off the shelf behind her, tears off a square with her teeth and leans across Annie’s lap to pat the dampness from beneath her eyes. It is, somehow, too intimate to bear; more than David’s clammy hands on her breasts, Jeff mashing their mouths together in the gathering dark. Just the pressure of Britta’s fingers, patiently sponging the tears from her cheeks. 

Annie can’t help it; she sobs again, loud and ragged. Britta stills in surprise, with her hand pressed to Annie’s face. “I think I’m a…” Her shoulders heave. “I wanted to do it,” Annie says instead. “Which is stupid, I know it’s stupid, because you don’t...you’re not like that, obviously. You’re…” Annie raises red-rimmed eyes to Britta, her heeled boots and skin-tight jeans, the spill of bright hair down her shoulders. 

“Do what?” Britta asks, quiet. 

Annie’s shredding a sheet of paper towel into strips, fingers working feverishly. Her skin heats. “Kiss you,” Annie says. 

She wants to take it back, after. I’m sorry, she would say. That’s crazy. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. 

But she can’t bring her mouth to shape the words. 

Britta sets aside the scrap of paper towel — sodden now, from Annie’s wet cheeks — and sits back. She shrugs, and says, “Then kiss me,” like it’s that easy. Annie opens her mouth and promptly closes it. There’s that feeling again — the tight compression in her chest — and Annie pulls breath in sharply, like she’s surfacing from deep waters.

“What?” she manages, finally. 

Britta is affronted, or maybe only nervous. She shifts forward and folds her arms across her chest, almost defensively. “I don’t know,” she says, frowning now. “It was your idea.” Only it hadn’t been an idea, exactly. More a confession, suffused — cleanly, all the way through — with shame. 

“I know,” Annie says, strained from crying. “I just — I didn’t think you…” 

“Well, now you know.” Britta loosens, and rocks back on her palms, grinning. She says, “You gonna do something about it?” like she’s throwing down the gauntlet. Annie rubs at her nose, raw and red and slightly wet; looks at Britta — at her mouth, her hands — and remembers how Britta had touched her, in sleep. Her body feels suddenly leaden.

“Britta, could you just — be quiet for a second, please?” The words emerge sounding clipped, reproving. “You’re making me nervous.” It doesn’t help that Britta’s smile broadens, holding back laughter. Annie squares her shoulders, bends down to curl her fingers in the lapels of Britta’s leather vest, and that look — of easy, careless self-assurance — slips. She looks up into Annie’s tear-streaked face, and inhales.

Annie’s pulse beats itself mercilessly against the skin of her wrists. She takes Britta’s chin between thumb and forefinger, and guides her face down; then — quickly, before Annie’s nerve fails her — presses their mouths together. It’s a brief, close-mouthed kiss, just the tentative brush of their lips. In books, women taste of pretty things, fruit-flavored lip gloss, or the residual bitterness of morning coffee; Britta doesn’t taste like much of anything, but her mouth is soft and pliant and Annie likes the feel of it against her own. 

They come apart, the distance between them somehow weighted. There’s the faint sheen of Annie’s chapstick on Britta’s lips, glinting beneath the fluorescents. Britta is quiet, and her eyes — narrowed, considering — are fixed on Annie. Annie catches the stain of pink on Britta’s cheeks and smoothed over the bridge of her nose like the beginnings of a fresh sunburn, and that familiar spark of wanting — sequestered, normally, to her bedroom, clandestine touches beneath the quilted covers — flares, and starts to grow. 

Annie decides: tonight, she will let it. 

And then Annie is upending the little yellow bucket in her haste to drop to the floor, coil her hands in Britta’s hair and kiss her again, harder now, with feeling. Britta slides both hands beneath Annie’s ass and hoists her up and into her lap. Annie groans, pushes into Britta’s mouth and sucks her lower lip between her teeth, teasing the skin to redness. And Britta pulls back, and kisses her, and kisses her again, and it feels so _good_ Annie thinks she may be drowning in it. 

Her eyes burn and brim and spill over, making hot tracks down her cheeks. Britta kisses her — slowly now — and comes away with the taste of salt in her mouth. She laughs, not unkindly, and says, “Wettest kiss I’ve ever had.” Annie glares past the translucent film of her tears, and Britta softens and smudges wetness from Annie’s face with the back of a hand. “Hey,” Britta says, sobering. “Was that good for you?” 

No one had ever asked before; and Annie had never dared ask herself. She’s still propped in Britta’s lap, and Britta’s touching her with a kind of idle tenderness; her fingers skitter over Annie’s damp cheeks, and skim along her neck, down to her collarbone. Annie’s eyes fall shut. A sob works its way up her throat. “Yes,” she says, swallowing. Yes. 

“Okay.” Britta smiles. “Me too. That’s what matters, right?” 

Annie blinks, dazed. “Britta,” she says. She means to say something more, but the words stick fast.

Britta shifts beneath her and looks up, brow furrowed. “Yeah?” she says, and Annie bends to kiss Britta’s jaw, the column of her neck; the shaded hollow of her throat and her mouth, her mouth, her mouth.

  
  


***

  
  


It doesn’t happen again — between the two of them, that is. 

That’s okay; once is enough to crack Annie wide open. 

  
  


***

  
  


She tells Abed three months later, on the floor of the blanket fort, over the white-noise hum of the television. He doesn’t say, “I know,” even though Annie’s pretty sure he does. Annie leans against his shoulder, and Abed tucks his head over hers, and they watch Inspector Spacetime through sleep-heavy eyes. Constable Edmund calibrates his X-7 Dimensionizer, and Annie thinks of Britta, and that kiss, and that _word —_ three syllables, and still somehow so heavy. 

He squeezes her hand beneath the covers, and Annie curls against him and tries—for once—not to overthink. Abed is here with her. He understands; and she doesn’t feel like crying anymore. At least, not just now. 

Maybe that’s a start.


End file.
